'I was a graduate student when I started it and was really interested in the idea of talking with people about the stuff I was learning,' she explained to Engadget. Kirsten 'Kiki' Sanford, founded the show in 2000. Neurophysiologist and science communicator, Dr. Originally a live radio show broadcast from KDVS on the University of California, Davis campus, it now reaches listeners in 60 countries as a weekly podcast. The podcasting community has also become a hotbed for science communication. 'The more that we're engaging with the public - and even engaging in our own communities - the more representation you have of everybody, the better and the stronger our scientific community will be,' McAnulty said.

They can produce their own content, cultivate their own audiences and share their passion for science directly.

However, with the rise of social media, especially Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, researchers from underrepresented groups don't have to wait for NatGeo to come knocking. 'In the process, they are choosing scientists that they think people will view as scientists,' she said, 'It's a positive feedback loop of sexism.' McAnulty notes that mainstream science media outlets like the Discovery Channel or NatGeo will cast their scientist hosts based on who will return the best ratings. And given that a 2018 study found that only around 30 percent of studies published in the Nature Index journals were penned by female researchers, that ability to connect with not just the public but other researchers as well, could help reduce that discrepancy. Indeed, the elimination of communication barriers and the waning influence of traditional 'gatekeepers' to the scientific community has enabled female, PoC, LGBTQ+, and non-binary researches a direct line to an interested public. 'So Tumblr has been really powerful for that.' 'I get more questions from Tumblr from young women who are thinking about being a scientist or just want to know more before they make a choice about what kind of careers they think they could see themselves in,' she said. 'Originally, it was just I wanted to see what what if it was possible because Tumblr, generally speaking, wasn't a place where science communication was happening too much.' Still, McAnulty found Tumblr to be less hostile to women than Reddit and that it skewed towards further a younger audience than Twitter. Without that social media aspect of scientists talking to each other on Twitter, I can't imagine I would have gotten this many teachers or scientists.'īefore Skype a Scientist, McAnulty launched the Squid Scientists Tumblr page in 2014. 'And then the word of mouth spread extraordinarily quickly. 'I basically did this whole thing via Twitter, I tweeted about it,' McAnulty said. In the last two and a half years, Skype a Scientist has served 15,000 classrooms and signed up 6,000 individual researchers to participate. Similar programs do exist, such as Letters to a Pre-Scientist, but nothing on this scale. 'As long as you have an internet connection, you're good to go.'īefore the advent of the internet, this sort of interaction simply wouldn't be feasible. Then, a sorting algorithm designed by bioinformatician David Jenkins, a PhD student at Boston University, matches up the two groups for a session. Teachers and interested parties fill out a Google form with their schedule availability while researchers and scientists fill out a similar form of their own. The operation itself is fairly straightforward. You can disable notifications at any time in your settings menu. 'We want people to get answers to what they actually want to know about. 'Typically it is structured as question and answer sessions, because we want people to feel as though they've really met a scientist, not just got lectured,' McAnulty continued. Each meeting lasts 30 minutes to an hour and operates as an informal Q&A session. Launched in 2017, it connects researchers from a broad range of fields with students, teachers and other interested groups via, well, Skype. 'I thought we needed some way to engage scientists, in a low time-commitment, high-impact, kind of way.' 'It was right after the election and I noticed that there was all this energy in the community, thinking about how we could better communicate our science to the public,' University of Connecticut PhD student Sarah McAnulty told Engadget. The advent of social media, in particular, is an unprecedented, powerful tool for science communicators. While that bit of 18th century mansplaining doesn't really hold up by today's standards, in the nearly three centuries since, the pace of scientific progress has only accelerated - with science communication evolving alongside it. The field of science communication - the practice of informing and educating people about science-related topics - arose just after the start of the Enlightenment when Francesco Algarotti published his first edition of Newtonianism for the Ladies in 1737.

Skype a scientist sarah mcanulty